A Good Man in Africa
by William Boyd
Buy on AmazonIn the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment. After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.
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"It is. Boyd was brought up in Ghana and Nigeria. It’s about the white man in Africa again, but it is lighter. It’s not insensitive, it’s quite sensitive to African life, but it’s really a comedy. It’s about a young diplomat’s life: an undersecretary in the embassy of a country quite like Ghana. It has elements of an old theme, the white man being treated as something extremely special in Africa whether he wants to be or not. My own take is that Africans want to know how it is that white men have got their hands on all the money. They believe there’s some trick you can learn. It’s a bit like people asking you how you write – how you get your ideas. Well there’s a bit of that, and then there’s the hierarchical tradition in Africa. White people have always been pretty near the top, because they governed many countries in Africa for quite some time and because, even in post-colonial Africa, they always have a role which is among the governing classes, the managing classes, the banking classes. Of course the wretched white Zimbabweans belong to the farming classes which the government has no respect for whatsoever. But that’s a slightly different point."
Being White in Africa · fivebooks.com